We got Lily back upstairs and into bed, her cheeks pink from the sun, already half asleep as I pulled the sheet up.

“Best vacation ever,” she murmured.

“The best,” I agreed, and kissed her forehead, and meant, with everything in me, that I would make the rest of her childhood safe.

It was not a wish.

I want to be precise about that.

It was a decision, made over a sleeping child in a dim resort room, as binding as any contract I had ever audited — that whatever the next days cost me, whatever I had to smile through and swallow and carry, the account would balance in exactly one direction, toward this small sunburned person and the ordinary safe life she deserved and had no idea was, at that moment, hanging by a thread.

Chapter 14 — The Brother by the Pool